We Have a New NameWe Have a New Name

Acronyms are the bane of information technology. Every specialized field — medicine, law, accounting, even sports — has its nomenclature, which always includes some impenetrable soup of acronyms. Such shorthand works well among insiders, but it slows down understanding for those living outside the borders. For IT, where the primary mission today is to align resources with business objectives and goals set by strategic executives and operational managers, barriers to communication and understanding are not things you want to let slide.

And so, we are renaming this Intelligent Enterprise Web Community, to be called IntelligentPerformance.com. In this way, we hope to leap over the well-meaning but sometimes self-serving disputes among market analysts and vendors over whether it should be business, corporate, or enterprise performance management to help everyone focus on that most important word, the one in the middle: performance.

We are also making this change to straighten out confusion with the other "BPM" we hear much about: business process management. This is important because the worlds of performance and process management are becoming interdependent. As we talk about their relationship, we don't want to sow further confusion.

Led by the considerable insight and talents of Community Editor Mark Smith and colleagues with his firm, Ventana Research, this Community will continue on its mission to bring you important analysis, news, and resources about performance management. What is performance management? To quote Mark from the Ventana Research Product Assessment Guide: "Performance management is the strategy, methodologies, and processes of managing the performance of the organization and its business network by leveraging assets to achieve a common set of goals and objectives."

Mark Your Calendars!

We are deep into our planning for the 2004 IntelligentPerformance Conference & Expo, which will be held November 15-18, 2004. This will be the second edition of the highly successful IntelligentBPM Conference & Expo, which was held in September 2003 in San Francisco. We are putting together a dynamite educational program, one that will help you understand and move forward with performance management.

We look forward to seeing everyone at this event! Stay tuned for more details shortly. Please send queries about the program and expo to [email protected].

I wish you the best of luck with your performance management initiatives.

David Stodder
Editorial Director, IntelligentPerformance.com
Editor-in-Chief, Intelligent Enterprise [email protected]